The day has long passed when, if you felt inclined, you could moralise on death and the frailty of human life to your heart's content and be sure of a hearing. I am sorry that the commonplaces on death find now only impatient readers, for they make pleasant reading in the pioneer essayists from poor Overbury to Steele; for death, with all its embroideries and trappings of destiny and Nemesis, is a pretty way of exercising that philosophy which no one is without. I envy the courage of the man who could now write an essay "On Death" as Bacon did once, laying down the law of it with no hint of an apology for the monotony of his subject; but there is now no essayist or philosopher with the calm and aloof assurance and arrogance of a Bacon, that you might see, after the last written words on the most trivial theme, this last seal, as though he were God, "Thus thought Francis Bacon." But of death there is nothing trivial and pleasant left to be said, and as a subject it has grown monotonous, except for the inevitable slayer and the slain, and that prevalent instinct for fair play ("the essential quality of the looker-on") which interests itself in the manner of the slaying. But this letter has seemed strange to me because, perhaps, I shall never again receive a letter whose writer is dead, and who, when writing it, dreamt of all material things but death. Were I Oscar Wilde I might wonder now if English-women who die in America come back to London; for there is much of London in the letter: "I should like to be in London to-day--Bloomsbury London, Mayfair London, Chelsea London, London of the small restaurants and large draughts of wine, London of the intellectual half-lights, drone of flippant phrases and racy epigrams, with a thin fog outside; London of a resigned good humour, of modulated debauch moving like her traffic, strips of colour through dusk, and drab, optimistic, noisy solitude, tranquillity of incessant sound: autumn lamplight, busy park, sheep, men, women, prostitutes: doors slamming, people coming in and sitting by the fire, more cigarettes, cakes, shops, myriads of people...." But I would not like to be in London this month of November. _The London Venture_: IV [Illustration] IV